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My understanding is that chinamen in Malaysia are more disadvantaged relative to Malays than whites are to minorities anywhere except South Africa. Is this not true?
Broadly accurate, and the SA comparison is the most relevant one, as SA is looking to replicate Malaysias system of positive discrimination for the underperforming racial majority. The difference is that the Whites who exercised power as a minority racial group - pied noirs, afrikaners in Southern Africa, french and greek populations across Lebanon and Egypt - exercised political power as a racial minority over the local racial majority in addition to their economic dominance. Save for the odd case of Thailand, minority Chinese have never managed to exercise political ower over local majority populations. The economic dominance of Chinese over local majority populations is in spite of political discrimination, though Chinese shamelessness in playing the local political does allow for second order political protections.
The inaccuracy of the comparison between local Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia and White minorities is that save for South Africa, Whites do not exist as a formalized racial class with associated racial privileges/discrimination (note: Latin America is a weird case). Despite malay supremacist claims, Chinese Malaysians are not a transient expat population, but multigenerational residents with almost equal historical presence in Malaysia to the Malays. Like South Africa, the Malays are actually external groups like Austronesian Bugis and Javanese, as opposed to truly indigenous populations like the Orang Asli. This is similar to South Africa, where the Bantu expansions resulted in a Zulu population dominating the original Xhosa. Chinese arrived in permanent numbers to Malaysia within one century of the Bugis expansions, just as Afrikaaners settled South Africa within a few centuries of Zulu expansion (George E Hale may be able to clarify my mistakes here). Without developing a political power base, Chinese have largely been viewed as a replenishing piggy bank for rulers to raid for financing development initiatives, with regular pogroms exercised to keep the Chinese in line (more common in Indonesia and Philippines, but several branches of my family were snuffed by Malays a century ago).
In any case, the who Malay political leaders (especially the Islamist supremacists) have found it expedient to use western theories of intersectionality to advance discrimination against Chinese via economic appropriation now find themselves bound by the public abuses committed by their islamist populations who are beneficiaries and proponents of Malay positive discrimination according to the same principle of intersectionality. The current meta is to not discuss the crimes committed and castigate anyone who calls attention to it as racist for Noticing.
The West, especiallywith the ostensibly post racial white majority populations, have internal political rivals as the proximate enemy to utilize wedge issues as a discussion issue. In most other countries, the racial minorities must be crushed first. Until that happens, crimes committed by your kin must be downplayed.
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